There Thousands In A Flock, For Ever Gay,
Loud Chirping Sparrows Welcome On The Day,
And From The Mazes Of The Leafy Thorn
Drop One By One Upon The Bending Corn.
Giles trudging along the borders of the field scares them with
his brushing-pole, until, overcome by fatigue and heat, he
takes a rest by the brakes and lying, half in sun and half in
shade, his attention is attracted to the minute insect life
that swarms about him:
The small dust-coloured beetle climbs with pain
O'er the smooth plantain leaf, a spacious plain!
Then higher still by countless steps conveyed,
He gains the summit of a shivering blade,
And flirts his filmy wings and looks around,
Exulting in his distance from the ground.
It is one of his little exquisite pictures. Presently his
vision is called to the springing lark:
Just starting from the corn, he cheerly sings,
And trusts with conscious pride his downy wings;
Still louder breathes, and in the face of day
Mounts up and calls on Giles to mark his way.
Close to his eye his hat he instant bends
And forms a friendly telescope that lends
Just aid enough to dull the glaring light
And place the wandering bird before his sight,
That oft beneath a light cloud sweeps along;
Lost for a while yet pours a varied song;
The eye still follows and the cloud moves by,
Again he stretches up the clear blue sky,
His form, his motions, undistinguished quite,
Save when he wheels direct from shade to light.
In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his
poles and starts again brushing round.
Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village
beauty, taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in
their unwonted liveliness and new-found wit
Confess the presence of a pretty face.
She is very rustic herself in her appearance: -
Her hat awry, divested of her gown,
Her creaking stays of leather, stout and brown:
Invidious barrier! why art thou so high,
When the slight covering of her neck slips by,
Then half revealing to the eager sight
Her full, ripe bosom, exquisitely white?
The leather stays have no doubt gone the way of many other
dreadful things, even in the most rustic villages in the land;
not so the barbarous practice of docking horses' tails,
against which he protests in this place when describing the
summer plague of flies and the excessive sufferings of the
domestic animals, especially of the poor horses deprived of
their only defence against such an enemy. At his own little
farm there was yet another plague in the form of an old
broken-winged gander, "the pest and tryant of the yard," whose
unpleasant habit it was to go for the beasts and seize them by
the fetlocks. The swine alone did not resent the attacks but
welcomed them, receiving the assaults as caresses, and
stretching themselves out and lying down and closing their
pigs' eyes, they would emit grunts of satisfaction, while the
triumphant bird, followed by the whole gabbling flock, would
trample on the heads of their prostrate foes.
"Autumn" opens bravely:
Again the year's decline, 'midst storms and floods,
The thund'ring chase, the yellow fading woods
Invite my song.
It contains two of the best things in the poem, the first in
the opening part, describing the swine in the acorn season, a
delightful picture which must be given in full: -
No more the fields with scattered grain supply
The restless tenants of the sty;
From oak to oak they run with eager haste,
And wrangling share the first delicious taste
Of fallen acorns; yet but thinly found
Till a strong gale has shook them to the ground.
It comes; and roaring woods obedient wave:
Their home well pleased the joint adventurers leave;
The trudging sow leads forth her numerous young,
Playful, and white, and clean, the briars among,
Till briars and thorns increasing fence them round,
Where last year's mould'ring leaves bestrew the ground,
And o'er their heads, loud lashed by furious squalls,
Bright from their cups the rattling treasure falls;
Hot thirsty food; whence doubly sweet and cool
The welcome margin of some rush-grown pool,
The wild duck's lonely haunt, whose jealous eye
Guards every point; who sits prepared to fly,
On the calm bosom of her little lake,
Too closely screened for ruffian winds to shake;
And as the bold intruders press around,
At once she starts and rises with a bound;
With bristles raised the sudden noise they hear,
And ludicrously wild and winged with fear,
The herd decamp with more than swinish speed,
And snorting dash through sedge and rush and reed;
Through tangled thickets headlong on they go,
Then stop and listen for their fancied foe;
The hindmost still the growing panic spreads,
Repeated fright the first alarm succeeds,
Till Folly's wages, wounds and thorns, they reap;
Yet glorying in their fortunate escape,
Their groundless terrors by degrees soon cease,
And Night's dark reign restores their peace.
For now the gale subsides, and from each bough
The roosting pheasant's short but frequent crow
Invites to rest, and huddling side by side
The herd in closest ambush seek to hide;
Seek some warm slope with shagged moss o'erspread,
Dried leaves their copious covering and their bed.
In vain may Giles, through gathering glooms that fall,
And solemn silence, urge his piercing call;
Whole days and nights they tarry 'midst their store,
Nor quit the woods till oaks can yield no more.
It is a delightful passage to one that knows a pig - the animal
we respect for its intelligence, holding it in this respect
higher, more human, than the horse, and at the same time laugh
at on account of certain ludicrous points about it, as for
example its liability to lose its head. Thousands of years of
comfortable domestic life have failed to rid it of this
inconvenient heritage from the time when wild in woods it ran.
Yet in this particular instance the terror of the swine does
not seem wholly inexcusable, if we know a wild duck as well as
a pig, especially the duck that takes to haunting a solitary
woodland pool, who, when intruded on, springs up with such a
sudden tremendous splash and flutter of wings and outrageous
screams, that man himself, if not prepared for it, may be
thrown off his balance.
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